Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi and translator Lin King won the International Booker Prize on Tuesday for “Taiwan Travelogue”, a playful postcolonial novel with a culinary bent.
The prestigious award, which was handed out in a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern gallery, recognises works of fiction from around the world that have been translated into English.
“Taiwan Travelogue” is the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the award, and Yang, born in 1984, is the first Taiwanese winner of the prize, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary.
Set in 1930s Japan-controlled Taiwan, the book poses as a translation of a rediscovered Japanese travel memoir penned by fictional writer Aoyama Chizuko.
It traces Chizuko’s travels and gastronomic adventures across the colonial outpost, and the intimate relationship she develops with her Taiwanese interpreter Chizuru.
“This is a book that surprises and isn’t perhaps what it seems like on the surface,” said chair of the judges Natasha Brown.
It “pulls off an incredible double feat: it succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel,” said Brown. “It’s a captivating, slyly sophisticated novel.”
The book beat out a story about a suburban witch by French novelist and playwright Marie NDiaye, as well as Brazilian Ana Paula Maia’s dystopian read about a brutal prison colony.
The other shortlisted works were “The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran” by German writer Shida Bazyar, “She Who Remains” by Bulgarian poet and writer Rene Karabash, and “The Director” by German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann, the only male author on the list.
Organisers say the award gives the authors writing in languages other than English a significant boost in profile and sales.
Previous winners Han Kang, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk have gone on to become Nobel laureates.
Also a writer of manga and video game scripts, this was Yang’s first book translated into English, by Taiwanese-American King.
They will share the £50,000 (U$67,000) prize money.
The book was first published in Mandarin in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award.
“The novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up,” Yang said.
